The godown, etc.

Without my mom, I sometimes feel like I’ve lost pieces of myself.

Maybe I have. I’m not sure.

Grief is multilayered and complicated and sneaky and twisty. This is true. But I don’t think this is only grief.

Maybe I’m grieving more things than I understand. Even though I failed probability and statistics, I’d say odds are high that this is the case.

I’m not saying my mom completed me. But when I start a sentence halfway through, or when I switch topics with no out loud segue and Nick has no idea what I’m talking about or why, I think about how Betty would’ve known exactly where I was in my thought process.

She’d have responded to that suddenly resumed conversation from a week prior. To the reference to something it took five mental hops, none of them linear, to get to.

It’s not just that. There’s a lifetime of vocabulary, and of shorthand, that’s gone.

I have very dear childhood friends, but it’s not the same.

When my parents moved to South America, and my mom started learning Spanish, she’d say things like, “Arroz is arroz is arroz.”

Up until she died, if one of us said, “Arroz,” the other would say, “…is arroz is arroz.”

It’s such a small thing, but in the way you learn in biology that a water droplet under a microscope is an entire world, a whole wallop of memories and feelings live in that silly twist on Gertrude Stein’s line.

I recently helped a friend who was moving, along with her Indian parents, into a new house. We tackled kitchen boxes.

When I asked where to put something, she showed me the pantry off the kitchen.

I asked her if her family called this a “godown.”

They do not.

I asked because the first time we ever had a pantry was when we lived in India, and we had a housekeeper who called it a godown.

From then on, whenever my parents lived somewhere with pantry, they called it a godown.

We live in an old Victorian rowhouse, which has many charms, but storage is not among them. Those Victorians, they tended to use wardrobes. Which I grew up calling almirahs.

Same same, but I haven’t used that word in years.

Anyway, we needed storage, so as part of the endless construction, we installed closets.

But for the canned and dry goods, we bought an IKEA closet. It’s practical and suits our needs perfectly.

Betty and I called this closet the godown. Do we have any canned tomatoes? Look on the bottom shelf in the godown.

We put it in the back room, a room off the kitchen that India, when she was small, called the “background”—and that’s what we call it forevermore. We could call it the laundry room, which it is, or the TV room, which it also is, but it’s the background.

I see how these things happen.

The godown is in the background.

And please don’t think I’d ever pretend not to know the word pantry. And I don’t make my family use the word godown, which means nothing to them.

On the whole, I do try not to be a dick.

We call it the pantry. Even though it’s not an actual pantry. But we don’t call it a closet, because we have a closet back there filled with closet-y stuff. And I’m never going to be all, look on the middle shelf of the Pax Tonstad.

I only asked my friend about the godown because her parents grew up in India.

As she and I were talking about it, I realized that with my mom gone, the godown, with all its associations, is, too.

It’s a word, but it’s a piece of myself. It’s vocabulary of my childhood. It’s the warm storage room off the kitchen in New Delhi when I was so young and full of promise, and didn’t know it. So pretty, and didn’t know it. So very lucky, and didn’t know it.

(It’s also the only place I’ve ever seen a shrew. A cute little shrew! Our DC neighborhood has a rat problem. Outdoors, but still. The horror.)

A bit later in the unpacking, I pulled a tiffin out of a box and said, “Ooh! A tiffin!”

If you’re not familiar, a tiffin is a stack of metal containers that fit one on top of the other, keeping food separate. There’s a band that holds them all in place. So you’ve got your various food compartments, and they’re secure.

I googled the history, and it’s colonial in origin, dating back to the British Raj.

My friend asked if I wanted it, as they never use it. I brought it home for India, who was delighted.

She packed her school lunch in it, and when she came home she told me her friends used a British accent and said, “Ooh! Is that where you keep your porridge?”

Then one suggested she return it to the 1900s.

Luckily, unlike me at that age—or really, so many ages—India has a strong sense of who she is and confidence in her choices. Getting teased about things she likes doesn’t make her question them.

India asked if I took a tiffin to school when I was a kid, and I told her I had a Snoopy lunchbox. It was metal, shaped like a doghouse. I loved it. It had a matching thermos, which I dropped at some point, shattering the insulation. You could shake it and hear it rattle, but the outer and inner layers were still intact.

In the 1900s, I told her, insulation was fragile.

In the 1900s, I didn’t tell her, I was fragile.

My mom would freeze my broken thermos full of Tang overnight, and by the time I had lunch outdoors in the heat, I’d have cold Tang with ice in the middle.

It’s not just the words and experiences from overseas . It’s pieces of everything I grew up with, everywhere.

After she moved in with us, mom found a place in Montana to order lefse, which is a Norwegian flatbread made from potato flour. Sometimes I made this with my grandmother in North Dakota, but more often, we bought it in the supermarket.

We put butter and sugar on it, and rolled it up.

My kids loved it, which made us both so happy. My friend Julie also grew up with lefse. She’s my only lefse friend here.

Nick tried it and was like, it has no flavor. Maybe put on, I don’t know, jam or something.

Jam on lefse? I told Julie, who was just as horrified as I was. WTF? You’d lose the potato flavor!

It’s weird little stuff like this that’s now gone. I could order lefse, I suppose, but I’m not going to.

Like Bridgeman’s ice cream in maple walnut. Or rum raisin.

It doesn’t matter, and it does.

Like, it’s not just the thing. It’s the who I was. It’s being with my Gramma Lillian, who loved me so so so much, and sitting in her tiny kitchen on the stool that had these steps that you could pull out and use as a stepladder.

I loved that stool.

It’s the middle of the night in that same kitchen with my mama and grandma, eating watermelon and giggling. And annoying my aunt, who lived with her mother in that small house her entire life, who’d admonish us to get to bed.

She always told us to get to bed when we stayed up late.

Back then, the word people used for her was “retarded,” but now she’d have a genetic diagnosis.

I resented her, because we competed for my grandmother’s attention. She thought we were supposed to mind her, because was an adult, but we didn’t, because we knew she was more like a kid, like us.

People looked at her when we went out, and I was embarrassed.

She died before I’d matured enough to just be with her as who she was.

I never talked about this with my mom. But I guess now she knows.

Wrapped up in all this is supper at 5:00 pm, and the Lawrence Whelk show, and the most extraordinary lilacs, and rhubarb merengue pie, and homemade pickles.

I wouldn’t even like those pickles now, because they were in heavy syrup. But my grandma made them for me, because they were my favorite.

It’s feeling special, feeling really and truly loved.

I tell myself that these experiences don’t go away, though I’ve lost the people I shared them with. It doesn’t mean that that me doesn’t exist, though it feels like it.

We’re aggregates of all our experiences, and all our relationships, aren’t we? I believe we are.

I know that’s why it’s so hard to excavate and release the trauma. And why old friends can trigger unexpected joy.

These pieces of me are in there, even if I might have to explain the bits I find so much comfort in not explaining.

I don’t have the vocabulary for this subconsious feeling of familiarity, of security that goes along with being understood and not explaining. Like a dry towel after a chilly swim. It’s just a plain old normal thing, unless you don’t have one.

I bet there’s a German word for this feeling.

Kind of like arroz by any other name…